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In her latest post, Zoe Enser (@GreeboRunner) considers the dangers of turning educational research into a tick-sheet of non-negotiables. I am a bit fan of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. His work, especially the 2012 pdf which is flying around everywhere, provides a clear and precise toolkit for effective teaching. It also provides a shared language,…

In her second guest post, Director of Improvement and CPD, Zoe Enser, discusses how CPD can be used to let teachers take the power back. ‘When the tempest rages, when the thunders roar, and the lightnings blaze around us it is then that the truly brave man stands firm at his post. Martin Luther Working in a school which had faced a number of challenges made us vulnerable in a number of ways. Often we were buffeted by the…

I really enjoyed this recent post by the great Tom Sherrington on Lessons That Misfire. In this post Tom carefully explains the conditions that make a great lesson before giving examples of the terrible activities he has seen that fail to deliver them. Most of these activities are ones I was encouraged to use when…

In our department CPD session this afternoon we looked at teacher explanation. We were interested in how we could make sure that our explanation was memorable and how we could support pupil’s working memory. Below are the slides I put together to trigger some discussions and share some key ideas. We started by sharing and…

My presentation at the 2018 ResearchEd National Conference was based on the conclusions I have reached about teaching after 15 years at the chalk face. There are three things I believe to be true. Teaching is essentially simple. What ever you want to teach you start with a recap of what they know about the issue…

Two stories are often told about teaching. The first is that it is very simple but some outside “other” comes to complicate it, the second that it is very complicated but some outside “other” fails to recognise this. So which is the most prevalent view among twitter’s teachers? As clear as ever. ***NEW POLL***Please RT…

In my last post, teacher agency and educational fads, I suggested that we as teachers had spent years having misinformation and lies thrown at us and that this was distorting our practice. This led Paul Garvey to ask Your blog doesn’t answer that question, as teaching has clearly improved greatly over this time when these…